Gandhi Before India

by Ramachandra Guha

  The day after Gandhi landed, he visited the family of his friend Henry Polak. They lived on Grosvenor Road, in Canonbury, North London. ‘Nothing surprised me, as you had prepared me for everything,’ wrote Mohandas to Henry, adding. ‘Otherwise to meet your sisters and your brilliant father would have been a most agreeable surprise. Both the sisters are really most lovable, and if I was unmarried, or young, or believed in mixed marriage, you know what I would have done!’4

  The same day, Gandhi wrote to his nephew Chhaganlal making a more neutral case for interracial living. Albert West’s sister had chosen to join him in South Africa. Gandhi thought this ‘a wise step’. ‘We do want some English ladies there [at Phoenix],’ he told his nephew. ‘Do please make the best use possible of her. Let your wife and other ladies mix freely with her, and let her feel that there is no distance between her and us, and make her as comfortable as possible … Each party has very strong points for the other to imbibe.’5

  While Miss West prepared for an austere life among abstemious Indians, Gandhi himself was billeted at the Cecil, one of London’s most luxurious hotels. For a visiting delegation, the hotel afforded respectability and a London address that was credible as well as convenient, within walking distance of Whitehall and Charing Cross railway station.6 Gandhi’s first few days in London were spent writing letters on the Cecil’s notepaper, addressed to Members of Parliament and newspaper editors whom he hoped to win over to the Indian case. The letters were typed by a Miss Lawson, who had been sent by Polak’s father to act as Gandhi’s assistant. They referred to H. O. Ally and himself rather grandly in the third person, as in ‘I shall be obliged if you would kindly grant the Deputation an interview …’

  Meanwhile, unknown to Gandhi – and Ally – their claims to represent the Transvaal Indians were being challenged. ‘It appears that there are two sections among the British Indians in the Transvaal,’ wrote the Colony’s Governor to the Secretary of State. One group was represented by Gandhi and Ally, while the other ‘denies that these two gentlemen have any mandate to represent them.’ The Governor himself was ‘unable to determine [the] relative strength of the two sections.’7

  The opposition to the deputation was led by a man named C. M. Pillay, a Tamil who had lived in Johannesburg from before the Anglo-Boer War. In November 1902 – when Gandhi was still in India – Pillay helped draft a petition which daringly asked that the Indians in the Transvaal be

  allowed to come and go freely; that they may trade, buy and sell unhindered and unmolested; that they may acquire, own, and dispose of landed property, without limit, clog, or undue obstacle; that they may, by inter-position of their rulers, be preserved from any differentiation in laws, or restriction of person in government, or in treatment; that they may in no way be curtailed of their liberty or freedom …

  The petition went on to demand Indian representation in legislatures and municipal boards. It was signed by twenty-two people, a majority of whom were Tamils.8

  Two months after this, Gandhi had arrived back in South Africa. Now based in Johannesburg, he quickly became the main channel through which Indian demands were articulated. This irritated C. M. Pillay, who saw the lawyer’s rise as a consequence of the support, financial and moral, of Gujarati merchants. When, in March 1904, the white press carried reports on the unsanitary habits of Indian shopkeepers, Pillay wrote to say that whereas the Tamils from the Madras Presidency were ‘immune from infectious diseases of all kinds’, the ‘Bombay Bunnias … are the most filthiest classes imaginable.’ Until about 1890, the Indians in the Transvaal were largely Tamils, but then merchants from Bombay and Gujarat arrived to spoil the show. Because of these Gujaratis, claimed Pillay, the

  Indian community in general … are made to suffer for the criminal perversity of a section whose chronic antipathy to cleanliness, fanatical adherence to superstition in its grossest form, and mammon worship is a most prolific source of contagious disease of the most virulent form.9

  Pillay signed his letter ‘late Secretary, Indian Congress, Pretoria and Johannesburg’. One does not know how many members his branch of the Congress had. At any rate, by 1906 Gandhi’s British Indian Association was clearly in the lead when it came to advancing the community’s cause. The rivalry was personal, but also communal. As a Tamil, Pillay spoke a different language from Gandhi and the Gujarati merchants. He may also have been originally from a different class, for his name suggests that his forefathers came to South Africa as indentured labourers.

  When the ‘deputation’ proceeded to London, Pillay made common cause with his fellow Tamil William Godfrey, a doctor from Natal now based in Johannesburg. The doctor’s rift with Gandhi was of more recent origin. Active in the British Indian Association, Dr Godfrey had been a featured speaker in the mass meeting held in the Empire Theatre on 11 September. He had hoped to be on the ship to London; however, when the BIA thought it wise to send a merchant as well, this left room for only one English-speaking professional, who, of course, had to be Gandhi.

  On 15 October, as the SS Armsdale made its way across the ocean, William Godfrey and C. M. Pillay sent a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. This claimed that Gandhi and Ally had no mandate to represent the Indians; and added for good measure that the lawyer was a ‘well known professional agitator who has made money out of his work’. Gandhi was accused of having ‘caused an estrangement between Europeans and Indians’; and Ally of being a pan-Islamist whose allegiances were to the Sultan of Turkey rather than the British Crown.10

  The petition sent by Pillay and Godfrey had more than a hundred names attached to it. Gandhi’s alert (and loyal) friend Henry Polak sought out its signatories. What he found was not edifying. A Tamil owner of an Indian laundry, persuaded by Godfrey that his omission from the delegation represented an affront to the Tamils, had placed a blank sheet of paper in front of forty-five of his workers, and got them to affix signatures and thumb-impressions. Told by Polak that his action had undermined Indian unity, the laundry-owner now disavowed the petition.11 Two of Godfrey’s brothers, who had been Gandhi’s friends and clients in Natal, wrote to The Times disassociating themselves from their sibling. The British Indian Association wired the Secretary of State to say that Gandhi and Ally were their authorized representatives, and that the ‘entire Indian community indignantly repudiate[d]’ a campaign based on Godfrey’s ‘personal animus’.12

  In London, the man who was at once the larger and lesser member of the deputation had fallen ill. The exact symptoms are unknown; but over-indulgence seems to have been the cause. Ally was rushed from the Hotel Cecil to Lady Margaret Hospital in the town of Bromley, ten miles south-east of Charing Cross. The hospital had been founded in 1903 by Josiah Oldfield, Gandhi’s old friend and flatmate from his student days. It was run on strict vegetarian principles, with treatment by diet replacing treatment by drugs. No meat or fish was permitted, nor any alcohol either. The food was cooked with coconut oil, then rather scarce in Britain.13

  Gandhi wrote to Oldfield urging him to see Ally every day – ‘Your presence alone would be inspiring and cheering.’ He added that ‘expense is of no consideration’. To Ally himself Gandhi offered this explanation of his ill-health: ‘I am superstitious enough to say it was due to the cigar.’ His recovery might be ‘retarded by even one puff of the deadly cigar – such is my strong conviction regarding nicotine’. The next day Gandhi wrote to his compatriot in similar vein: ‘I beseech you to keep yourself religiously away from cigars. Certainly, have as much as you like of the hubble-bubble’ (which, with its tobacco diluted through water, presumably was less harmful). ‘Follow Dr Oldfield’s instructions implicitly,’ urged Gandhi. ‘I am certain that no other doctor could restore you to health with the same amount of despatch as Mr Oldfield.’

  The last was said with some conviction, for Gandhi was consulting the same doctor himself. Back in the days when he was practising law in Bombay, Gandhi told Oldfield, he had lost his sense of smell; now he had chronic catarrh. H
e asked whether his friend could treat him, or instead recommend a throat specialist. Another ailment was related to their shared passion and lifestyle choices. ‘I think it was when I was carrying on a fruit-and-nut diet experiment,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘that I damaged my teeth. I believe that I had permanently damaged two molars and I thought that I was going to lose one of them on board. I certainly tried hard to pull one out but I did not succeed. Would you see them or do you want me to go to a dentist?’ Although they were old friends, if Oldfield was to attend to either complaint Gandhi insisted on paying his professional fees.14

  On 31 October, Gandhi wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Elgin, requesting an appointment for a delegation consisting of himself, Ally and some well-placed Englishmen; a statement of the Indian case was attached. The meeting was scheduled for 8 November. Since Elgin was a former Viceroy, Gandhi asked some members of the Indian Civil Service to join the delegation. Since he was also a senior British politician, the former MP Dadabhai Naoroji and the serving MP M. M. Bhownaggree were asked to come too. Gandhi went three times to the House of Commons to meet the Liberal MP Harold Cox, who eventually also agreed to come.

  In the first week of November, Gandhi had several meetings with a radical and somewhat raffish Indian he knew would never fit into any formal delegation. His name was Shyamaji Krishnavarma. Twelve years older than Gandhi and also from Kathiawar, Krishnavarma had studied at Oxford and been called to the London Bar. Back in India, he held a series of jobs in the Kathiawari principalities before returning to England in 1905.

  Krishnavarma thought the Indian National Congress too loyalist by far; what he stood for was complete emancipation from British rule. He established an ‘India House’ at Highgate in London (not far from the cemetery where Karl Marx was buried), which served as a hostel for students and a forum for debate. Students who lived here took a pledge that they would not work for the colonial bureaucracy when they returned home. Krishnavarma also published a journal called The Indian Sociologist, which argued the case for freedom for subject peoples. His greatest English supporter was the socialist and anti-imperialist H. M. Hyndman.15

  Gandhi knew of Krishnavarma’s work, for it had been written about in Indian Opinion. Now they met in London, where, to begin with at any rate, the younger man was intrigued by the older man. He was impressed by his learning – Krishnavarma knew Latin, Greek and Sanskrit – and somewhat intimidated by his passion. On successive Sundays, Gandhi passed up invitations to the Polak household in order to debate Indian issues with him. As he wrote to Polak père, ‘the Pandit of whom I spoke to you and I have not finished the whole of our discussion, and as it is rather important I am afraid I must deprive myself of the pleasure’ (of meeting the father and his charming daughters).16 Later, in a report to Indian Opinion, Gandhi summarized the character and credo of his new friend in these words:

  Though he can afford to live in comfort, he lives in poverty. He dresses simply and lives like an ascetic. His mission is service to his country. The idea underlying his service is that there should be complete swaraj [freedom] for India and that the British should quit the country, handing over power to Indians. If they do not do so, the Indians should refuse them all help so that they become unable to carry on the administration and are forced to leave. He holds that unless this is done the people of India will never be happy. Everything else will follow swaraj.17

  After a week in hospital, H. O. Ally moved back to the Hotel Cecil. However, on Oldfield’s advice, he had hour-long massages every evening, to make him fit for the meeting with the Secretary of State for the Colonies.

  Two days before meeting the deputation, Lord Elgin received a joint letter from five Indians from South Africa studying in London – three Christian, one Muslim and one Hindu. The letter was clearly prompted and very likely drafted by Gandhi. It detailed the disabilities under the laws being proposed in the Transvaal, noting that the signatories would not be able to gain entry into the colony on their return. It tellingly added: ‘We are here being nurtured in the teachings of Bentham, Austin, and other English writers whose names are a watchword for liberty and independence, and we could hardly believe that anything of the kind referred to above would possibly be applicable to us.’18

  On the afternoon of 8 November, Gandhi, Ally and ten others were at the Colonial Office to meet Lord Elgin. The first to speak was Sir Lepel Griffin, former Chief Secretary of the Punjab and current chairman of the East India Association. Here is the official transcript of part of what Griffin said:

  And against whom is this [offending] legislation directed? Against the most orderly, honourable, industrious, temperate race in the world, people of our own stock and blood, with whom our own language has as a sister-language been connected …

  And by whom is this legislation instigated? I am told, and I believe it, that it is not by the best part of the British community in the Transvaal, who are, I believe, in favour of giving all reasonable privileges to British Indian subjects; it is by the alien foreign population in the Transvaal who are perhaps to some extent inconvenienced by Indian traders who are so very much more temperate and industrious than themselves. It does not come from the English. The legislation is prompted, and the prejudice against the Indians is encouraged, by the aliens, by Russian Jews, by Syrians, by German Jews, by every class of aliens, the very off-scourings of the international sewers of Europe.

  The two questions were pertinent, but Griffin’s answer to the second was extraordinary. From where and whence did this diatribe come? Was it a product of Sir Lepel Griffin’s own prejudices, or a more general pandering to the anti-Semitism then common among the British ruling class? In fact, it was Boers and Britons, Christians both, who had been in the forefront of the anti-Indian legislation. To be sure, some recent Jewish immigrants to the Transvaal were hostile to Indian traders who competed with them. Even so, Gandhi’s closest supporters were, as often as not, Jews such as Henry Polak, Hermann Kallenbach and Lewis Ritch. What did Gandhi think of Sir Lepel’s diatribe, as he heard it? Alas, the records are silent on the matter.19

  Gandhi spoke next, and with sobriety. He explained how the new Ordinance violated the ‘fundamental maxim of the British law’ that everyone was presumed innocent unless proven otherwise; it ‘brands every Indian as guilty’. It originally applied to women too, but as a result of their protests at least this had been withdrawn. The larger worry was that it would be applied elsewhere, that ‘what the Transvaal thinks today the other Colonies think tomorrow.’

  H. O. Ally spoke briefly, endorsing Gandhi’s stand and emphasizing that they were ‘loyal British subjects’ who did not demand political parity. ‘We are content that the white man should be predominant in the Transvaal,’ said Ally, ‘but we do feel that we are entitled to all the other ordinary rights that a British subject should enjoy.’

  The Indian MP M. M. Bhownaggree also spoke. He invoked the duty Elgin owed India and Indians, as the ‘custodian and guardian of Indian interests and the protector of their rights, during a memorable and distinguished viceroyalty’. Dadabhai Naoroji drew attention to the political traditions of the party of which he, like the Colonial Secretary, was a member. ‘If there is one principle more important than another,’ remarked Naoroji, ‘it is that of the freedom of British subjects under the British flag, and I do hope that the British Government, especially a Liberal Government, will stand upon that basis.’ (It was characteristic that the Indian Tory stressed the official’s duty, whereas the Indian Liberal emphasized a broader principle.)

  Having heard everybody out, Elgin then responded. He did not think ‘that the impression of thumb mark in itself should be a very debasing operation’. Gandhi interjected that it was a ten-finger mark that was required, which in India was asked for only in the case of criminals. Elgin replied, ‘I do not want to argue it, but I think that there is just that much to be said.’ He then turned to the forces behind the new legislation. He had received many telegrams from different (white)
municipalities in the Transvaal urging him to pass the Ordinance. ‘I cannot, therefore, entirely subscribe to what Sir Lepel Griffin said about the opposition [of whites to Indians].’ He admitted that had he been in the India Office rather than the Colonial Office, he might have himself signed dispatches ‘protesting, in as strong language as has been used here, against the restrictions on British citizens’. However, placed where he was, he had

  to recognize the fact that all over the world there are difficulties arising on the part of white communities, and we have to reckon with them. I do not say that they ought always to succeed; they certainly ought not to succeed in points of detail which would, in any way, involve oppression. But the fact of there being that sentiment has to be borne in mind when we have to deal with matters of this description.

  He ended with a carefully worded equivocation: ‘I have now heard what Mr Gandhi had to say … I have heard the other gentlemen who have accompanied him. I will give the best consideration to their representations, and I shall think it my duty to make up my mind with the full responsibility which I have to assume.’20

  Writing to Henry Polak, Gandhi, ever the optimist, described his meeting with Elgin as ‘exceedingly good’.21 For his part, the Secretary of State for the Colonies was now persuaded that Gandhi and Ally were ‘really representative of the majority of their compatriots’. Elgin wrote to the Transvaal Government that while he appreciated the force of white sentiment, he would not want to advise Royal Assent to the new legislation just yet. He asked them ‘to favour me with a further expression of your own opinion on the question, in view of the strong, and, as I gather, somewhat unexpected, opposition with which the Ordinance has been met by the majority of the Indian community.’22